part of the solution, somehow

 This is my first time living in a country where there is no culture of protest (see the link I attached at the bottom for more explanation of that) and I’m still working on finding non-confrontational and flexible ways of holding onto my values while I make Qatar my home. This post is not intended to bash Qatar or any of the people who make their homes here for the long or short-terms. It is intended to be about how the context of my host country and culture influences and challenges how I try to live by my values. 

These two phrases haunt me. They almost always get used in a pointed way, alongside an issue that I should at all costs be supporting, according to the person who shares one quote or the other.  On one hand I want to say “Oh please.  Big world, lotta people, lotta ways to make a difference, stop bossing me around, stop telling me what to care about!” I’m only one person and who does it help if I spend too much of my time obsessed about taking a stand on the dozens of issues I follow on a week to week basis?  I can’t believe my rigidity and anxiety in this short life will make the world a better place. On the other hand, I carry guilt for not having the wherewithal to support everything I believe in, even in the US where I’m freer to take part in demonstrations, petitions, marches and challenge authority, and where I am more comfortable with the culture. In some ways being abroad takes the pressure off, in some it layers it on thicker and heavier.  It takes time in a new country before I feel that I understand enough of what’s going on around me to hold a valid opinion about it, anyway.

In my last post I talked about how living in Qatar  “represents so much of what I distrust about modern humanity- the total manipulation of environment, the dependence on fossil fuels, the lack of local resources for so much of what we eat and use every day, the highly divided class/employment system.”  Before we even landed here I had great concerns about moving to a place that only exists by virtue of an abundance of fossil fuels and a massive expat workforce.

I put the blame for a lot of our human problems and many environmental ones too down to greed and lack of empathy. There are surely multitudes of ways of making change, and I have great admiration for my friends whose work in education, food security, environmental activism, and social justice is making the world a better and fairer place.  They humble me.

Living with myself and my choices here in Doha is partly a matter of shelving some priorities altogether and partly about making some work in a new context.  An early challenge for any move to a new country is learning what expectations are for women’s behavior and deciding how thoroughly I choose to comply. Some are easy because it’s just plain good sense in a hot place: my shoulders and knees have not been visible in public, except at the pool, since I left the United States last August.  Others are easy, if less pleasant, because I have no choice: whether I liked it or not, I needed my husband’s permission to be able to apply for a driver’s license. Some I ignore, like going to the camel market with my daughter even though there is never a woman in sight. Still others are more confusing: the advice I got when I needed to get a driver’s license but didn’t have free time to take the test due to homeschooling, was to go to the traffic department to plead my case, to be persistent, but pitiful.  Even more effective, I should bring along my youngest child and make a point of carrying her. It grated to be seeking their pity for my weakness rather than their respect for me and empathy for my situation. Once the kids started school I was relieved to give up begging and just took the test (which was an unexpectedly positive experience as I wrote here) and vowed not to grovel ever again, no matter what the circumstances.

I have a friend who, in Dhaka, waded into a crowd of men beating on a suspected thief and shamed them into stopping.  I’d like to think I would do the same but I am afraid I wouldn’t.  I witnessed a man beating someone inside a stopped land cruiser here a few months ago but it was nighttime, I was on foot, and the only people nearby were oblivious in the honking rushing traffic next to us.  I made a big show of using my phone to take a picture of the number plate and then pretending to make a phone call, even though my hand had been too shaky to capture the digits. They immediately pulled away into the crush of cars on Al Waab St, and I walked on to my choir rehearsal. I’m still not satisfied with how I reacted.

Is passive action enough? Is it enough to share articles on FB?  To tip everyone who helps me, on the assumption that the more I pay, the sooner they can go home to their families in their home country?  To leave the car behind and walk as much as I can, though the hotter it gets the more I find myself driving ridiculously short distances? To buy as local as possible? How important is it to buy local vegetables and eggs when it must require a ridiculous amount of the resources to raise the plants and chickens in the desert? Is it enough to debrief with my kids and share with my network abroad when we witness injustice, rather than acting on it in the moment?

In the taxi the other night I asked the driver where he’s from.  He said Kenya and we fell into a discussion about President Obama and what he means to Kenyans, about how hard it is to visit the US as a Muslim, about our kids and eventually about wives not working and staying with the kids.  He commended me for not working outside my home. As I got out of the taxi he blessed me and my family over and over. Should I have spoken up and said hey man, not giving your wife a choice to work is so oppressive?  I chose not.  After all, staying with my kids is what I do, and he was affirming that.  We were enjoying each other’s company and we’ll probably never see each other again.

I love how time spent living abroad and moving every few years has expanded my exposure so many people and nurtured my empathy.  I have met so many different people who care passionately about so many different issues, some passionately on opposite sides of the same issue.  I will nearly always put ground-level connection over confrontation and criticism. I hold myself responsible to behaving in a way I can live with, showing respect and listening to everyone –especially people I disagree with.  My ideals/values/position on world events are influenced by a more personal connection to people and places. I hope this helps me resist the media spin that manipulates who we should care about, and how much, and that my connection with people I meet broadens their view of their world as well. 

If I stood firmly by my values I could not remain here.   I admit to being part of the problem.  I don’t think the earth is a healthy place, due in large part to humans taking it over. There are so many of us. I get so overwhelmed. Where is the best place for me within it all? For now, I choose my family, raising thoughtful kids, making connections with people from all over.  Qatar is certainly fertile ground for that, with only 12% of the population being Qatari citizens and the rest of us expats from around the world. For now I am compromising, living a lifestyle that does not entirely reflect my values and beliefs in favor of deepening my understanding of my world and sharing this process with my kids.  

The following links are mostly connected to issues I follow that affect Qatar and the people who live here,  plus two for context on Qatar, and one to a book with gorgeous illustrations and a message that works for me.

Criticism for the sponsorship system:

http://dohanews.co/ahead-expected-changes-un-official-hits-kafala-supporters/

All my garbage, including items that are potentially recyclable, go into one garbage can. This article tells about how it gets taken to a spot in the desert not far from Doha where it is burned, and the toxic smoke drifts on the winds. 

http://dohaburning.wordpress.com

The experience of a Swedish flight attendant with Qatar Airways: http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/the-truth-about-the-luxury-of-qatar-airways/

Letter written by a Nepali teacher who was briefly jailed in Qatar last year, explaining how he actually had it relatively easy compared to some of the other inmates he met http://dohanews.co/guest-post-in-qatar-jailed-asian-expats-guilty-until/

Some statistics:

http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2013/country-chapters/qatar

Protest in Qatar: http://www.opendemocracy.net/michael-stephens/qatar-and-protest-difficult-combination

And this last one is not about Qatar but is a beautiful book that helps pull me back to right here and now whenever I read it aloud to my kids: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/books/children-s-books-501972.html

home again, nine months in

Home is such a tedious, overdone subject for those of us who have moved a lot. Where are we from? Where did we live before this move? How long does it take before a new place becomes a home?  Is it the people, the unpacked bags, the routines, knowing multiple ways to get to a single destination, the Legos on the floor?

Talking about home in an expat crowd is as cliché as talking about the weather, but we just can’t let go of it, any more than we can stop talking about how hot is in Qatar. I have gotten so tired of myself as I have worked on this post, so sick of talking about home home home that I keep closing the file and walking away.  And then I meet yet another someone who says “oh you got here last August, you’re still so new!” and I start in on thinking some more about home.

We’ve been here nine months now. Nine months, in my experience, is about when I usually start feeling like I have the hang of a new place- when the “trailing” part of this undesirable label stops weighing so heavily on me.  I’m more relaxed and independent, I explore this no-longer-quite-new home less tentatively.  

All these moves may have not been good for my resume but I’d say I’m highly qualified to talk about the concept of home.  Somehow in the past ten years I became the home-maker, the one who assembles and arranges the furniture and books and art, who decides which utensils, pots, and pans belong on which shelves. I hire and manage any domestic staff we happen to have. I have experienced what having a reliable permanent home is like- I grew up in one house from ages 3-16, the same one to which we still return for visits to my parents.  I went to the same camp as a camper and later staff for all but three of the summers between 1983 and 2001.  Then at 16 I left for 9 months in France and since then I have spent an average of around 12 months anywhere I’ve lived in the past 24 years (not counting traveling, but I do count places that for various reasons I/we meant to live for a year or more but had to leave earlier than intended).  The average goes up to 17 months for the 11 years since we had kids.

In America I have a more complicated relationship with home and all the expectations around it.  In 2009 we returned from Vietnam to the US to live, doing that deliberately for the first time as a family. We bought a house near Atlanta, letting ourselves imagine that it might be our “forever” home. We chose it because we loved it best of the dozens of houses we looked at, with its quirky oldness and a modern angular addition.  It has a big backyard and friendly neighbors on all sides.

After three years there, longer than any place I’ve lived since childhood, a layoff forced a move to San Francisco and I swore I’d never want to own a house again, wished we’d never bought that house in the first place.  We moved to duplex in a park, a neighborhood of drab rentals down the hill from some of the most expensive mansions in the city.  Where before I used to eye others’ houses and imagine what it would be like if I lived there, now I was thoroughly and fiercely not envious of their posh permanence, their views and landscaping. Nine months into San Francisco, I wrote this: I know my way around, enough that I only turn on my GPS about once a month or so.  I've been through the honeymoon phase, when I loved it so much I thought it hurt, and the hating phase, when I was done with this traffic-clotted unfriendly place, and now I nearly feel like I'm home.   A couple of friends lately have gently suggested that it may be time to put down roots.  I politely decline, at least to put down the kinds of roots they're thinking of.  I used to think that the ultimate goal was to get a house and plant a garden and make it all beautiful and cozy and welcoming.  We tried that in Georgia and for a number of reasons it was a colossal mistake. 

I would walk the loop around the rim of the watershed above our house and try to resist loving the greenery and the view and the herons hunting frogs and gophers.  I resisted as hard as I loved it, because after Georgia I couldn’t trust I would get to keep it. 

I was right. One early morning in June, a year and a half after driving in over the Bay Bridge, the kids and I left over the Golden Gate Bridge as we headed East towards Qatar- driving across the US and then flying over to the other side of the world.

Our second night out on our drive west, we stayed in a house belonging to a friend from grad school.  After a day of driving across the barren wasteland of northern Nevada and then the even more barren wasteland of Utah salt flats, their house and the lushly green avenues of Salt Lake City were a welcoming oasis. Their house had a beautiful balance of history and home and child-friendliness that reminded me, for the first time since we left GA, that owning and living in a house indefinitely could be something positive.

And now we’re talking about selling our house in Georgia. Living as an expat makes it easier to get my mind around the concept of multiple homes and suddenly I’m not sure I want to get rid of the house that just a year ago I wished had never been bought. Do I hate that we are giving up a great house in a sweet neighborhood because I have duped myself into buying into the mythical American dream, that I should own a house in the US in order to feel settled?  Or is it just that given our history and the slight but real precariousness of living abroad, I want to have a safe haven in my home country, where I know I can stay if we have to return before we’re ready? I’ll surely come around to the idea of selling, I of all people should understand that it’s not up to any of us to define home for other people or even for ourselves.

I don’t love Qatar.  I appreciate the experiences I’m having and I love moments but I don’t want to make peace with the forces underlying our existence here.  Doha represents so much of what I distrust about modern humanity- the total manipulation of environment, the dependence on fossil fuels, the lack of local resources for so much of what we eat and use every day, the highly divided class/employment system. And despite all that, for now, it’s home. I hope that all this moving is teaching my kids that home isn’t a thing with fixed boundaries, outside of which everything is strange and fearsome. I’d like to think they will understand that home is something you choose, that it’s a feeling of familiarity with your environment, any place you can relax into your best self, and that even the most unlikely places can feel like home. 

pop up community, Doha

Communities form quickly when we are sharing a situation that’s beyond our control.  It can happen anywhere but Qatar provides especially rich opportunities.  It’s such a common experience in Doha to be expected to meet bureaucratic requirements, even while having, at best, only a vague idea of the necessary procedures. It can be so incredibly frustrating to try to navigate this as an individual or family, but I’ve learned from two recent experiences that it can be surprisingly rewarding to undertake these challenges in a group of fellow confused people.   

Three months ago I boarded a minibus along with fourteen other women, all strangers to one another.  We drove through back streets of Doha, following a little sedan holding an officer from the traffic department and a woman chaperone in the back seat.  One by one the ladies on the bus took a turn in the sedan's driver’s seat, and drove wherever we were told, hoping to pass our road test and gain some freedom of movement in our adopted city.

My seatmate and I quickly established that we had no language in common and she went back to talking to others in Arabic and praying quietly to herself.  I had no idea if there was an order to who was being tested.  Little by little, though, over the next two hours, a camaraderie grew amongst our small group, first tentative and then truly warm.  When my seatmate went to take her place in the testing car, a woman from Jordan sat down next to me and started telling me a little of what was going on, about the woman who was testing who had already failed six times, that there was no order- each person just volunteered when she was ready, and most reassuring of all, that no one ever knows quite what’s going on in Qatar.  

We all watched the little car in front intently, women clicking their tongues at errors or chanting "signal, signal," sighing in commiseration when the route took us through a busy roundabout.  One woman came back nearly immediately for forgetting to put on her seatbelt.  Most that failed were philosophical.  One young woman got on the bus sobbing and everyone rallied round her, listening and then comforting and encouraging. They wished me good luck as I got up to take my turn and then welcomed me back with congratulations and questions about the examiner when I returned, having passed. 

  

Today I drove through dense and unruly traffic with my husband and youngest child to get new ID cards.  This was our second attempt- last week we left when we saw the line extending out the door and heard rumors that the machine was broken and that those who had been called had still not returned.

At first we were just a group of unrelated people filling a room, dulled by the prospect of hours of tedious waiting for various biometric scans necessary to issue our new ID cards. Eventually mothers and children spilled out onto the lawn outside and sat in small family groups. We offered to share our art supplies with the nearest pair and soon two girls were making us playdough pizzas and nests full of eggs, with breaks to run in circles as fast as they could before coming back and demanding snacks. 

We reluctantly returned to the crowd inside when our number was nearly up but the group there had started to loosen up too, with former strangers deep in conversation.  The girls set up their playdough lab in a corner and reappeared at one point with mouths full of chocolates given to them by a security guard.  By the time we received our new cards, three and a half hours after taking our numbers, we were sharing a laugh about the ridiculousness of the whole affair with others who'd been behind us in the queue and making plans to get the girls together again one day soon.